Private Universe

Philosophy and popular culture

I just finished reading Batman Unmasked by Will Brooker. He is a cultural studies professor, although he apparently belongs to a department of "Communications." (Is it me, or does "communications" just not sound like an academic discipline? It is one step up in specificity from "Study of Stuff.")

Having invested a lot of time on academia in my life, as well as a lot of time on SF fandom, I'm naturally interested in the spaces where these two things interact. I think Brooker's book is a good example of how they should interact. He is a sharp and thorough scholar but also a loving fan, and he is reflective about how these two roles sometimes reinforce each other and sometimes pull against each other. I will say more about his Batman book in the next post.

I have a standard spiel about "academics take on popular culture" type books, which I don't think has made it onto the blog (until now). In philosophy, these books are proliferating right and left these days, and their editors often have a certain fuzziness about what the mission of their book is supposed to be.

There are three things you can do if you want to do "philosophy and popular culture."

(1) "Hey, this bit of Buffy is just like this bit of Heidegger." This is basically using Buffy as an accessible on-ramp to teach people about Heidegger. Nothing wrong with that; Gazza teaches a popular and successful Philosophy and Science Fiction course that is probably the most fun of all possible ways to learn about philosophy. (I guarantee he doesn't cover any Heidegger though.) But I think people sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that by writing this kind of stuff they are also saying something deep and profound about Buffy. And, really? Not so much.

Unfortunately, a whole lot of contributors to the philosophy and popular culture books seem to do these essays, and after making the point "this is like that!" they may not have said anything particularly interesting about either the TV show or the philosopher.

Looking at the table of contents of Batman and Philosophy, for example, I see articles on Batman and Wittgenstein, Batman and Kierkegaard, and "Aristotle, Kant, and Dick Grayson on Moral Education." I haven't read this book, but these topics really threaten to be This Is Like That topics.

(2) "Star Wars has genre relationships to fantasy and westerns as well as to science fiction." The second kind of mission you can have is using the tools of your discipline to say something interesting about your TV show (or comic or movie or whatever.) This is my favorite approach, because I think that subjects like Buffy, Batman, and Star Wars deserve study in themselves. I aimed to do this kind of thinking back when I was teaching a course called "Aesthetics of Film." About a third of the course (my favorite third) was about genre films - what are genres? should you apply the same standards of quality to a "genre film" versus an "art film"? are art films really genre-less? I saw us as using the philosophy "toolbox" of analyzing/defining/categorizing things, and applying broader aesthetic questions about how to properly judge artworks to case studies like summer blockbuster movies. I really resist the idea that a philosophy of film course should cover a specific canon of films - that is what Film Studies is for. One of the great things about philosophy is that you can do philosophy about whatever you think is interesting. Sometime I should put up my spinoff spiel on Spiderman 2 as an examination and reaffirmation of the superhero genre. I see I never blogged it, though I did review Spidey 3.

(3) I used to think that the above two options were the only choices, but I have been corrected by English/Comp Lit/Cultural Studies folks who prefer a third approach. They like to use the popular culture artifact to say something about the culture that produced it. This is not something analytic philosophers tend to do, but it strikes me as an interesting project.

Brooker is a cultural studies guy, as I said, but he is mostly focusing on #2 in his Batman book. This may be partly because he is a big Batman fan, and therefore (like me) thinks that it is worth focusing on Batman for his own sake. In the next post I will talk about what he has to say about him.

Labels: books, comics, ideas, movies

posted by Jaime_sama @ 10:14 AM